Wendy Parker

Attention seeking at its finest

My new best friend, Paul Carpenter, hates truckers. We may have to break up.

Salena Laterra, of The Daily Rant, sent me a link to an article Mr. Carpenter wrote this past weekend. According to his article, the trucking industry should be forced to make things safer. He also stated that fuel taxes weren’t fair and truckers should pay 9,600 times more per gallon than the general public. Mr. Carpenter obviously makes a ton of money, because I’m wondering how he thinks anyone is going to be able to afford to eat when a company has to pay more than the goods are worth to get them to the consumers. I can assure you if the Waltons don’t stand to bank on a item sold on the shelves of Walmart, it won’t be readily available.

This is nothing new for Carpenter. His game is pretty stale. He riles people up to improve his Google Analytics numbers every couple of months, then spends his time bitching about everything from people who don’t want school uniforms to tattoos. He and I are actually a lot alike, except I don’t hate truckers. He calls himself a Libertarian, and if I were going to associate myself with any political vermin, it would probably be them. He likes to bitch and moan a lot, and well, so do I. You can see how we would hit it off.

Here’s where we differ.

I would never in a million years use the tragedy of a lost human life to improve my numbers. I wouldn’t consider using phrases like “Murphy burned to death or choked to death from smoke” for the simple shock value. We all saw the pictures, Carpenter, we know how the guy died and it was awful and those phrases were unnecessary and gratuitous.

When my daughter was 11 years old, her biological father was killed in a tragic car wreck. He ran his car off into a swamp and drowned. It was bad enough telling my child that her dad was dead, but when she got a copy of the newspaper that had his obituary in it, a hack like Carpenter had written an article about her father’s accident and used the same, awful, gratuitous language about how he likely suffered and drowned alone in a dark swamp. I had no idea the article was in the paper, and when my kid found it and read it, it destroyed her world. Mr. Murphy had a family, and his family doesn’t need to relive the pain he endured for someone’s ratings numbers, or anything else, for that matter.

I fully intended to dissect his article and insert the pertinent information he neglected to mention. As a matter of fact, I spent the last two days collecting information to educate Mr. Carpenter with. When I sat down to do a final edit of this article I realized that Carpenter knows all these statistics, and he’s known them since he started his war with the industry years ago. He simply doesn’t care to produce viable, unbiased statistics. He uses all the same websites I used to gather this info. I will say that legalinfo.com is a pretty poor source for unbiased information, unless you or someone you loved have been injured in a trucking accident. I stick with the more reliable sites, like, oh, I don’t know, the U.S. Department of Labor, which listed the median income of a truck driver to be $38,200 a year. And yes, at $38K a year, I can imagine a lot of people would squeal if you tried to cut their pay. It’s barely a living wage anymore.

I’ve done exactly what Mr. Carpenter wants by mentioning him and giving him attention. I realize this, and I will say this is the one and only time he will get a post dedicated to him because I’m going to do what we all should do and forget he ever existed. The government he appeals to for copious regulation on anything and everything is ignoring him — we should too. He has nothing to offer but negativity, and frankly, I got enough of that swirling around without his help.

So this is goodbye, Paul. I’d love to say I’ll miss you, but I won’t. Bless your heart.

I sent Mr. Carpenter a letter too, I told him if he wants to raise taxes on us, fine, at the same percentage rate he wants our road taxes raised, he should enjoy that $250 loaf of bread and $250 half gallon of milk.

Dave

I will only agree that the industry needs to make itself safer in that there has to be stringent guidelines for driver training and that these “schools” need to be accredited in a new system or else they can’t be recognized. Aside from that every point he makes is just rhetoric to whip everyone who can’t think for themselves into a frenzy. The sad part is, there are so many sheep out there that things like this do get some traction.

With a world of information at your fingertips people are less informed than ever, tragic.

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Wendy Parker

Wendy Parker rides with her husband, George Parker, an owner-operator who pulls dry van. She chronicles their adventures and her observations from the shotgun position in her blog and at their website, http://www.thegeorgeandwendyshow.com/index.html